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As an affiliate that promotes everything from clothes to surveys to video streaming, I see a lot of different offers and business models. Once upon a time I was happy to take $1 per sign up for an offer even if it meant sending my traffic away to a competitor. It was revenue! And I didn’t know any better.
Last week at ShareASale ThinkTank I had a number of conversations with bloggers about why they should not promote toolbars that will steal their commissions. Little did I know the big surprise I would receive from a merchant this morning.
SavingStar is a great way to save money using digital grocery coupons. I use them myself. I promote them to my members. I guess I should say “promoted.”
I received an email as a SavingStar affiliate announcing happily their new cash back shopping and toolbar. I’m sure that it is very exciting for them because it will bring in huge revenue for them. As an affiliate, huge warning bells went off in my head. Here are a few lines from the email that worried me most:
- We also have a toolbar which makes it seamless and easy to save all the time you see a deal.
- Through SavingStar’s Cashback Mall, you can save every time you shop at sites like Groupon, Travelocity, Proflowers, Macys.com, Sears.com, LandsEnd.com, BestBuy.com, and hundreds of other online stores.
- Enjoy promoting these amazing offers and I will be updating you more frequently about exclusive coupons, increased cash back and holiday shopping deals.
Unless I am misunderstanding something, SavingStar wants me to encourage my visitors to shop through SavingStar’s affiliate links. Those links include merchants that I myself promote. So if I am encouraging them to shop through SavingStar, I am basically flushing my own affiliate revenue down the toilet.
I may make $2 for convincing someone to sign up with SavingStar, but how much am I losing when I promote a Macy’s deal on my site but my visitors use their handy dandy SavingStar toolbar to get a deal and cash back? Even if the toolbar is not set to pop up when an affiliate link is used, are you willing to take the chance to encourage them to use a cash back site to get your $2 and then just hope that they do not ever use the cash back site?
I have nothing against the cash back business model. I own a cash back site. But I also tell bloggers not to promote cash back or coupon sites if they are going to use affiliate links themselves. If you aren’t going to use any other affiliate links, by all means take the CPA on referring your visitors to other deal sites.
SavingStar is just the most recent merchant-turned-affiliate to pull this. I’m calling them out only because 1) a lot of bloggers will not even catch that email, and 2) many will not understand the significance of the shift from just grocery coupons to online deals. Eric Nagel is working on a post you’ll want to read about some of the other ways you might be valuing short-term over long-term. I’ll link to that as soon as it is up.
Are you a blogger that has been promoting SavingStar? Will you continue to promote them? If you are a merchant or affiliate manager, how do you feel about participating with a “merchant/affiliate” like this?
I’ve actually written about SavingStar before and promote them via one of only a handful of banner ads on the sidebar of my daddy blog. I completely understand what you’re saying, Tricia. And agree 100%. If this was my old coupon site, I would definitely stop promoting SavingStar immediately as my site is full of hundreds of the same affiliates that SS is pushing.
But on my daddy blog, I only have a small handful of affiliate links and don’t make much through them at all. I’ve found that most bloggers (well, I should say most mommy/daddy bloggers) don’t like affiliate programs as they just don’t work for them. Personally, I think they CAN work with blogs if it’s the right match. The right company mixed with the right audience, and not just put up as a big ol’ banner ad, but worked organically into content. I”m still trying to crack that nut myself actually.
As such, I’ll continue promoting SavingStar on my blog since there’s really next to no overlap. At least for now.
What I love about your comment is that you show that you are educated about when to divert to CPA traffic and when not to. There are definitely some bloggers who are better off going the CPA route because either they don’t spend a lot of time on a given site or they just aren’t interested in affiliate marketing. I’m sure this will work out well for them. My hope is that every blogger reads this post (and the comments) and makes that decision for their sites themselves knowing the pros and cons.
I’d be curious to hear how Brian Littleton would say they’re trying to protect affiliates from this. I didn’t know about leapfrogging until Think Tank- maybe they have something in the works for this too.
On the plus side, I don’t think that this toolbar overwrites cookies. So there technically isn’t anything unethical about it. But the negative side is that newer affiliates just don’t realize what is happening when they send their traffic there. The problem is that they start off by promoting cash back or coupon sites initially to make the bounty money. Then after they start getting approached by merchants, they try their hand at affiliate marketing. But they’ve already been promoting those sites so much that they have conditioned their readers to shop through those other sites to get their cash back or coupons.
I think this is happening with a number of other big merchants as well (you send your traffic there as an affiliate and then they turn around and use affiliate links on their site and you get nothing for it). I don’t know what the solution is except maybe the leapfrogging?
Is this a situation where leapfrogging would apply?
I think it definitely COULD if the merchant were to set it up like that. But by the looks of the merchants that have opted in so far, it would all just be cookie overwriting. Whether people are going to SavingStar to look for the coupons or to get the cash back.